Facebook tweaks tool to give ad buyers better feedback

Facebook is updating its Ads Manager campaign-tracking tool to provide advertisers with a bit more awareness of how their ads are performing against stated goals.

The refreshed Ads Manager tool, rolling out over the next few weeks, lets marketers identify their most important campaign goal, such as Page likes or app installs, to better determine the cost for that specific action.

The tool is also designed to help buyers calculate the return on their investment (ROI). The ROI changes encompass additional insight into the value of ads that link out to third-party landing pages and Web sites. Advertisers employing conversion tracking, which Facebook supports through tracking pixels, will find that their conversion results are more emphasized, and that Facebook now shows the calculated cost per conversion -- aka the price for a click, registration, purchase, or whatever the advertiser has defined as a conversion -- for each ad.

The social network also computes the estimated conversion value of the ad if the advertiser assigns a value to each conversion.

The tweaks are a response to advertiser requests for more data on their ad buys on social-networking sites. In a perfect world, the changes will make Facebook's inventory more attractive to buyers, but we all know that Facebook's world, especially when it comes to ads, is far from perfect.